Playworld

by Adam Ross

“A man like that,” Mom countered, “treats his cars like women and his women like cars.”

“But mostly, infidelity is a case of what I like to call the practical use of other people.”

“There’s not a person in the world who’s yet been able to entirely fulfill another’s needs,” Elliott continued. “For some people this is as disappointing as it is unacceptable.” “So how do you stop it from happening?” I asked. “Infidelity, or disappointment?”

swear to God, if I could go back in time, you know what I would eliminate? What I’d lobotomize from my brain? The future. I’d let myself experience everything as it happened like you do now instead of wondering like I always did.

“Something bad happens to everyone,” he said. “Except it’s not bad. It’s just something. That’s the trick. Recognizing it’s just something. That’s the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering’s the former and pain’s the latter.”

This state of being I suffered wasn’t permanent, no matter what happened.

Because I could now name this feeling I’d been suffering, one that had dogged me of late, during our vacation and afterward, but that I recognized from all the way back to the fire. It had been so omnipresent it was more like an atmosphere—one that, having been made aware of it, I could neither unsee nor unfeel, and its name was loneliness.

Time, which either ruins or changes everything—even a love well begun.

Shouldn’t love be a swimming with, like fish in a school, as opposed to a swimming after?

Just because you stand your ground doesn’t mean you’ve won the day. Nor are all bullies cowards.

the beginning of a thing, he thought, a thing seems impossible.

How to describe seeing someone whose loss you’ve already mourned? He could say it was like encountering a ghost, but that would be inaccurate, for ghosts were not of this world.

Who would we see on our periphery, Shel wondered, if we adjusted our vision? Who was walking parallel to us if we widened our depth of field?

How rare it is, Shel found himself thinking, to simply like someone. To know, in their company, that you would never be bored.

can’t,” she finally said. “Yes, you can,” Shel said. “If you don’t want to, that’s something else.”

approves”—before the brain’s “best gesture.” To give oneself over to another is best; to resist playacting is required. What anyone wants, standing before the beloved, is the person wholly themselves—which was close, I concluded, to holiness.

You find something very hard and warm inside of you when you do difficult things. That no one can take away. Like a sauna stone. But it’s more precious and magic, really. And it’s always there when you need it.

I was taught the indelible lesson that, to arrive at love, I must suffer through someone else’s idea of it. And yet even now, I resist the notion that we are reducible to our wounds.

“So be good for you first and foremost, Griffin. You weren’t put on the planet to make sure they love each other, okay?”

The house was so old it was almost never completely silent, which was a way, I thought, that such places made you feel a bit less lonely.

It felt wicked, before and during—this velocity—though afterward it made me terribly sad.

judge people not by how they lose, but how they win.

There comes a point, even in the summer, when you want the season to end.

“That sounds hard.” “Lots of simple things are,” she said.

“Never mistake your own perceptiveness for self-awareness,” he’d once told me, in those fervent couple of years I saw him again when I returned from school, “because one is an entirely different mode of knowledge than the other.”